190 Walkers Mills Road

In 1710 Queen Anne bought six thousand acres back from Robert Livingston and his wife Alida, land on the east bank of the Hudson set aside for the Palatine refugees who landed that October and called the place East Camp. Germantown grew out of that purchase. A century and a half later Franklin Ellis, compiling his History of the County of Columbia in 1878, wrote down what stood on this stretch of water: Walker's Mills, eight or ten houses and shops, a store kept by Peter Becker, Thomas Morton formerly in trade at the same place. The houses and the shops are gone. The mill is still here, and so is the road name.

The mill runs three storeys of coursed fieldstone under a gabled roof, six-over-six sash set in plain stone lintels, a corbelled brick chimney at the ridge. An iron-rimmed waterwheel with timber spokes is mounted flat against the downhill gable, above a flagstone terrace cut into the bank, with a timber stair climbing past it to the deck. David Whitcomb, the New York interior designer whose rooms ran in Architectural Digest and House Beautiful from the 1970s into the 1990s, took the abandoned building and enlarged it into a house. The work came before Tailings, the four-pavilion house he built a few miles from here on White Birch Road with the architect William Richard McGilvray, finished in 1987.

Inside are walls left as bare fieldstone, doorways cut with stone jambs, hand-hewn beams carrying panels of pierced tracery between them. Louvered shutters fold back from the windows onto wide-plank floors, and a marble mantel sits over the firebox in the beamed room. The barn is the second residence, and between the two there are 4,500 square feet, five bedrooms and seven baths. Twenty and a half acres run down to the Klein Kill, which falls over a low dam behind the house and shallows into a rock bed on its way to the Hudson at Linlithgo. Two hundred years ago the water here did the work. Now it only makes the noise.

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